Is It Any Wonder Why the Covid Hysteria Is Over the Top?

(Don Boudreaux)

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Listening to Juliette Sellgren’s excellent Great Antidote discussion with free-range mom Lenore Skenazy reveals a least part of the reason for Covid Derangement Syndrome: Over the past couple of decades parents have come bizarrely to believe that a world of zero-risk should be pursued for their children. This manner of parenting – in intent and display so caring while in consequences so cruel – cannot but help instill in children an inordinate fear of reality, a belief that even the most remote risk is intolerable, and a foolish faith that, if we try hard enough, we can and should make the world 100 percent safe.

There’s no doubt in my mind that there would never have been lockdowns if elites did not have the ability granted by the modern marvels of technology to continue to earn incomes from their homes. But another factor that contributes to the acceptance of this 21st-century tyranny is the absurd, detached-from-all-reality attitudes toward risk possessed by so many people, and especially by young professionals.

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I just returned from a long, fast walk around a beautiful lake in northern Virginia. The weather is lovely and the path around the lake was not crowded. I never wear a mask outdoors and so, of course, I didn’t have one on during my walk.

As on my walk I got nearer to a young masked young mother and her masked toddler who were walking toward me, the young mother, apparently noticing that I was maskless, frantically grabbed her toddler and quickly carried him about fifteen feet off of the footpath as I walked by. I couldn’t bear to look back at this pathetic spectacle of irrational fear, but I assume that Masked Mom waited a minute or two for my contamination to disperse before she and Masked Junior returned to the footpath. One can’t be too safe!